


a stitch in time (saves nine)

by pixymisa



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean-Centric, Demon Deals, Established Relationship, Hurt Sam Winchester, M/M, Minor Injuries, Protective Dean Winchester, Self-Esteem Issues, Supernatural Reverse Big Bang Challenge 2015, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-02-11
Packaged: 2018-05-19 16:01:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5973397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pixymisa/pseuds/pixymisa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The deadline on Dean’s deal is coming due, and soon. Things are broken and desperate between Sam and Dean when, in the middle of what they think is a simple hunt, they run into people who look like them...</p>
            </blockquote>





	a stitch in time (saves nine)

**Author's Note:**

> WOOOOOO! Been a while, SPN fandom! Many thanks to the reversebang comm on livejournal for running this absolute fun beast of a challenge, many thanks to my beta and partner-in-crime [selecasharp](http://archiveofourown.org/users/selecasharp/pseuds/selecasharp) who is the best waifu I could ask for, and thanks to [emberdreamweave](http://emberdreamweave.livejournal.com) for the art that got me started. This was supposed to be a silly fic, really, and then Dean went all SRS BSNS on me.
> 
> Crossposted here: **[LJ](http://teashopmuses.livejournal.com/96936.html)**

 

*** 

Of course Dean is more into it than Sam. Sam has spent the last few months looking more and more ragged around the edges, getting that determined _look_ that he has when he’s obsessed with something, and Dean tries not to know about it because he literally _can’t_. Sam’s life is on the line, and Dean already gave up so fucking much to get that back, so the only thing he can do it throw himself into the hunt and ignore everything else.

Which is pretty much how he stumbles onto the article. Small town, midwest charm, old cemetery, disturbances and grave desecration — blah blah blah lather rinse repeat. Sam goes along with it because Dean ignores the fact that the library in town is a historic building, has been in place since 1885, and has its own rare books section in it. Dean knows the game, even if he isn’t playing. He can’t get his hopes up because he can’t, circular logic be damned or some shit.

Dean leaves Sam at the library and checks the cemetery out, toes his boot at the disturbed piles of ancient graveyard dirt, and kicks loose a splinter of bone. This is really more Sam’s deal than his, so he pulls out his phone and calls Sam — “Yeah, Sammy, got something I think you might want to take a look at.”

“On my way,” Sam replies, and even through the shitty small-town reception, Dean can hear the rustle of pages and the echoing sound of a heavy book slamming shut. Dean closes his eyes and tries not to think about what Sam might have found — he can’t know about it so he doesn’t — and when he opens them again the bone shard is glinting up at him in the cold February sunlight. He crouches down but doesn’t touch, and this close to the disturbed dirt he can smell the rank rot of old corpse, but it doesn’t matter because he can see teeth-marks on the bone.

Sam appears minutes later, hair ruffled and cheeks reddened from the wind. He gets down and picks up the bone in his bare hand, exactly like Dean knew he would, runs his thumb across the imprint of teeth on bone. “Human,” Sam says, and in unison they both straighten up.

“Pretty sure a cannibal isn’t going to be digging up old bodies to chew on. At least not in February.” Dean shoves his hands into the pockets of Dad’s jacket, pulls the leather closer to try to keep himself warm. “Hides in human form?”

Sam shrugs. “Or at least has a human set of teeth.”

Dean runs through the possibilities in his head. A tahquitz feeds on the marrow of witches, but also drains the life out of wooded areas. A baykok kills and eats its prey, but the dates on the headstone aren’t recent enough. A ghoul, perhaps? They can take the form of their last victim, he thinks, and they hang out in old graveyards and eat the flesh of the dead. Dad tangled with a ghoul at least once before, Dean is pretty sure he remembers something about one in the Journal. Remembers Dad’s face, lined and white and drawn, remembers him mumbling the word once, followed by a string of curses.

He rubs at his face, wishing for the days when he and Sam targeted angry spirits and haunted houses. Before demons and deals and Dad’s and Sammy’s deaths.

“We come back at nightfall,” Dean says. “Machetes?”

Sam nods, curt, and stares down at the open grave.

Dean turns away, trying hard not to think.

***

They head back to the library for more research. Ghouls have specific tastes, Dean thinks he remembers, going after family lines, following blood back to an ancestor. They hold grudges, so the names of the victims are probably a giant-ass clue. Four disturbed sites, three of them related, one probably illegitimate, all four graves over forty years old.

The librarian is an old woman, is a part of the local Historical Society, and has rolls of old microfilm that she lets them scroll through. Dean squints his way through birth and death records, gray on sepia, ink faded and blurred, film cracked and discolored. Time eating away at the proof of these people’s existence, like rain eroding tombstones down to nothing.

Dean wonders how many ghosts are out there with no bones, no connections left, nothing to hold them to the earth but anger and trauma, and he thinks of Sam slinking away, back to his stack of rare books and his drive to save Dean from the coming deadline.

There’s nothing he can do, so he wipes at his eyes and focuses on the records, trying to figure out the connection, to tease out the clue that makes everything make sense. It doesn’t always work out that way, especially not now, but he wants it to, wants to wrap the hunt up in a nice bow and say _well done_ and not hurt for a while.

Sam comes and gets him at dusk, pulls him away from the microfilm reader, his mouth set in a narrow white line. They stand by the Impala and Sam turns to him, opens up like he wants to say something, and his mouth crashes into Dean’s.

Dean presses him against the cold metal, sucks the words away from him, tastes guilt and grief and need. Dean’s hard, achingly so, but they have work to do so he pulls away instead of grinding closer. Sam’s eyes are dark, but he doesn’t question the choice, just heads back to the trunk and waits for Dean to open it.

They pull out their machetes, make their way over to the cemetery again, and wait in the dark for something to happen. They don’t talk, don’t joke or make faces at each other like they would have only a year ago. The cold settles into Dean’s bones until he hurts, and he thinks about finishing this shit job in this shit town and pressing up against Sam until they’re both breathless and spent.

The night passes slowly.

Nothing happens.

Come sunrise, Sam’s face is closed shut, eyes circled in gray. Dean knows he looks just as bad.

 

Something changed in Sam after that damned Trickster and the fucking Mystery Spot. They’ve been out of alignment ever since, catching sharp edges on each other where they should be locked in like clockwork. It wasn’t this bad after Stanford, wasn’t this desperate and raw and broken apart.

And one night, it all boiled over. Dean held him down, pinned him to the bed closest to the door, his by brotherly right, after Sam set his things down on it like it was _his_ instead. Dean knew then that the Trickster had fucked with Sammy, fucked with his head good. 

_Dean_ , Sam said, the same way he used to say _Jess_.

They didn’t talk about it, didn’t share their feelings on the matter. Sam gave him everything, gave it up like it was a gift, and Dean took and took until there wasn’t a part of Sam left untouched.

Dean’s on his way to Hell anyway.

 

Dean wants to stamp his feet to get the blood flowing in his toes again, but frost has formed in a circle around them. The sun is still low in the sky, cold and distant, and it may be hours before it warms enough to erase the signs that they were there, so he just stands and waits for Sam. Sam huffs the air, breath billowing out in a white cloud.

“Not a ghoul,” he pronounces.

Dean nods. A ghoul would have come in the night, would have turned up the frozen earth and fed. He shoves his hands deep into the pockets of Dad’s jacket, hands raw and red and chapped from the night. “Still our best lead,” he says, gentle.

He doesn’t feel gentle. He wants to rage, to kick over the headstones, break the skin over his knuckles on some ugly creature, wants to take his frustration out by killing as many evil _things_ as he can before the clock strikes twelve.

“Okay,” Sam says, and Dean can’t figure out if it’s a question or an answer so he shrugs and turns away.

They see the helpful librarian from the day before, wrapped in a long gray shawl and head bent over one of the headstones like she’s saying a prayer. Her shadow is long and hooked, and they hesitate before moving forward towards her. Dean stows his machete inside his jacket, and he hears a rustle coming from Sam, like he’s doing the same. He doesn’t want to startle the old woman, but at the same time the hair is standing up on his arms and the back of his neck.

He turns to Sam to ask him, “Do you feel that?” and the air is still and thick, like lightning is about to strike. He doesn’t get the words out; there’s a crackle and recoil unlike anything he’s felt before, the air thick with ozone.

Two shapes strike her from the side. At first, Dean thinks the shapes miss their mark, undershoot the target, but then the librarian is on the ground, thrashing. Everything about her fades to gray, the color leeched out of her, turning skin and hair almost transparent. Dean bolts forward, pulls his machete free, and dives into the larger of the two shapes. He doesn’t expect to connect so solidly, thinks that the creature or whatever it is will duck or dodge out of the way before he hits it, so when he does he lies there for a moment, staring into its face.

It looks like Sam.

Not an exact copy of him, not like a skinwalker or shapeshifter. This not-Sam has longer, shaggier hair, has creases running across its forehead, smile-lines bracketing its mouth. It looks like an older, more tired version of Sam.

It kicks him off in a smooth motion, flings him aside into a headstone and scrambles to its feet. It and the other shape hesitate for a moment, staring back at him, before they run for the trees. 

“What was that?” Sam asks, sounding as blindsided as Dean feels.

“I don’t know,” Dean replies. “But it sure as hell looked like us.”

***

The old librarian doesn’t move as they approach her body. Sam reaches out for her, brushes her hair away from her eyes, which are open sockets staring upward. She looks otherwise fine, except for being dead, but her shadow is still long and crooked when it should be crumpled up like the rest of her. Sam crouches near the edge of the stretched shadow, and touches the hilt of a machete buried in the frozen ground.

Dean looks at the machete in his hand, and then back to the one sticking out of the ground. They both have the initials DW scratched messily into the butt of the hilt, and when he holds them close together the initials are identical.

“The hell?” Dean mutters, and he pulls the machete out of the frozen ground.

Instantly, the old librarian lurches forward and grabs the nearest thing she can reach, Sam’s leg. Sam goes down, bellowing in pain, spatters of blood a bright contrast to their surroundings. Dean lodges both machetes in her chest. She screeches and howls but doesn’t die. Instead, she takes off, pulling away from Dean and the machetes in his hands like he isn’t even there. She moves away, like a shadow passing in front of a light, a smooth, fluid motion.

It’s only after she’s gone that Dean thinks that he never even saw her feet move.

He turns to Sam, who’s still on the ground clutching at his leg, bright red blood spilling over onto the frozen earth, steaming in the cold air. He offers Sam a hand, hooks their thumbs together and pulls him to his feet. Sam lists to one side, drunk on pain, and only then can Dean see the damage that’s been done. There’s a long, narrow bone, bleached gray and white with age, stained with Sam’s blood. It’s pierced straight through Sam’s leg.

Dean thinks about infection, about gangrene, about Sam losing his leg to whatever the old woman is, and for a moment his vision goes gray. But then Sam’s pulling on his jacket, gasping and panting and begging him to _hurry up, before someone sees us_. Dean makes it all of the way back to the Impala before he thinks to tie a tourniquet around Sam’s leg to slow the bleeding. The bone stays in place until Dean can take care of it properly.

This is hospital-bad, this calls for surgery and stitches and real antibiotics, but Dean doesn’t drive to a hospital. He takes them back to their shitty motel on the edge of town, stops by a pharmacy to pick up supplies, and then helps Sam inside so he can treat the injury himself.

They stop just inside the door, and Dean pulls out his Taurus and clicks off the safety as a warning.

Their doubles just sit there on the bed, Dean’s bed, looking up at him like they do this kind of shit all the time.

Not-Dean holds out his hand, waiting. “I’d like my machete back,” he says.

 

Last time something like this went down, Dean laughed and made jokes about the shapeshifter that had been wearing his face, and because things weren’t broken back then, Sam smiled and let it slide. Dean ignored the way that Sam flinched away from him for the first few nights, the way he curled up tight into a ball in his bed, back facing Dean in his sleep. He even ignored the fact that Sam’s friend Rebecca, Little Becky, was never brought up again.

Dean tried not to think about what the shapeshifter might have done, what he might have said to Sammy before Sam realized it wasn’t his brother after all. He wanted to ask, to break apart the mystery that was Sam’ head and unspool his secrets, but.

_No chick-flick moments._

He wanted to touch, wanted to reach out in the night and lay his hands on Sam and feel all of the places that the shapeshifter might have touched him. He wanted to breathe in the space between them, wanted to know what it was that made Sam know it wasn’t him, wanted to know if the shapeshifter had tried anything, wanted to know if Sam had leaned into his touch and sighed and breathed _finally_ , or if the shapeshifter had spilled all of the darkness in Dean’s head all over Sam.

But, of course, they never talked about it.

 

Dean points his Taurus directly between the eyes of the thing wearing his face. Sam hisses next to him, shifting, but the click of Sam’s Berretta is reassuring, even if Sam is bleeding out onto the shitty motel carpeting.

“Dean,” not-Sam says, weary and gravel-rough, and Dean’s double shakes his head.

“I don’t care,” not-him replies. “We’ve already changed things. It doesn’t matter.” It stands, hands up in surrender, but like the Sam-double, it looks worn down and tired. It pulls a knife from the inside of its jacket, rolls its sleeve up, and lays the blade across its arm. Red blood wells up, dribbles over its skin and adds to the stains on the floor. Then it flips the blade, hands it out to Dean hilt-first.

Dean glances at Sam, pale and shaking but still standing, and lowers his own gun so he can look at the knife. Everything feels slow and hazy, like he’s moving through molasses, and he’s startled when he looks closer at the knife and sees that he recognizes this, too. It’s his, given to him by Dad years ago, a fine silver alloy that burns shifters and werewolves and revenants alike. It’s also sitting in the trunk of the Impala, next to Sam’s collection of knives.

“They’re not shapeshifters,” Sam says, reading Dean’s silence.

Not-Dean gestures to the bed, gets out of their way like he knows what comes next. Not-Sam stays put, though, rolls up the cuff of its jeans until Dean can see an old angry scar on its shin. Dean looks between Sam and his double, not thinking, not reacting.

“Sam,” Dean says, finally, and Sam huffs and gets on the bed next to his double. Blood smears across the bedspread, and Dean takes the silver knife and cuts away the leg of Sam’s jeans so he can see the damage. He pulls supplies out, lays them out neat and orderly, like Dad used to, and then gets to work patching his brother up. He pulls the impaled bone out, carefully, flushes the wound with cheap whiskey mixed with salt and holy water. The mixture burns like a motherfucker, Dean knows from experience, but it removes chunks of splintered bone and torn denim easily. Sam takes it like he always does, grits his teeth and hisses curses, but holds still, even when Dean packs the hole with antibiotic ointment and gauze.

When it’s all done, not-Sam rolls the cuff of its jeans back down. Dean doesn’t have to look at the old scar to see the point it’s trying to make.

“Skip the _Back to the Future_ bullshit,” Dean tells them.

“Can’t,” not-Dean shoots back. “We’re from 2015.”

***

The one thing Dean hasn’t considered in all of this is that he might have a future. If he believes them, these future versions of him and Sam, then there is hope. Sam will find a loophole, they’ll break the deal, or free Dean’s soul, or _something_ to get him out of his great roadtrip downstairs.

So not-Dean makes the joke Dean would have, and the sigh that not-Sam huffs out is so bitchy and _Sam_ that Dean can’t _help_ but believe them.

Their future selves don’t say anything about the _how_ of time travel — though Dean’s doppelganger rolls his eyes and bitches about it like it’s something he’s done before — but they have a lot to say about the _why_. The old librarian is a creature called a shade, human in form, only vulnerable during dawn and dusk. The more it eats, the more powerful it becomes, and by the time the Sam and Dean of the future circle back around to take her out, she’s eliminated the entire town and is strong enough to take down several powerful allies that can’t be mentioned by name because of fucking _spoilers_ or something.

So then the logical thing, obviously, is time travel. Because why not?

Future-Sam passes a look over at future-Dean, a foreign one that Dean’s never seen on Sam’s face before, and says, “But it’s been too long. We couldn’t remember exactly where we were before or what happened when we did.” And it seems odd that seven years would have that kind of effect, but whatever.

“We’re definitely changing things,” future-Dean adds, passing that strange look back to future-Sam again. Dean shoots his own brother a look, and when Sam nods at him, he knows he’s not the only one who’s picked up on it.

There is something colossally huge that their future selves are dancing around. Dean thinks it might have something to do with Hell, but there’s no way to tell for sure, not without asking their doubles, and even that isn’t a guarantee of getting a straight answer. Even in the last year, even with Dean being as close to his brother as he is, living in each other’s pockets and breathing in the same air and sharing the same space, they haven’t been completely honest with each other. There’s still enough room for secrets.

So Dean rolls his eyes and pretends like it doesn’t bother him. It’s pretty much his natural state by now, anyway.

“Are your memories changing?” Sam asks, and Dean just stares at the other version of Sam, watching his reaction. He keeps his face even, like he’s used to not letting how he feels show, which is some bullshit because Sam’s face is the most expressive thing about him, but future-Sam is a blank wall that Dean can’t read.

Future-Dean flickers his eyes down and to the side, like he wants to look at his Sam’s leg, the one with the scar that mirrors actual-Sam’s wound. “Not that I can tell,” he replies. “I can’t remember this and how it all went down. It’s different from the other time, too. Last time, we couldn’t change anything. We tried, though.” He runs a hand over his face, looking a hell of a lot older than he should. “We tried,” he repeats, soft and deep.

Future-Sam lays a hand on future-Dean’s shoulder, and it’s so strange that they both look surprised by the gesture.

Dean feels something inside of him go cold. How could there be a time in the future when they don’t feel comfortable touching each other? Even now, with the quiet sex thing hanging between them, they can’t help but bump shoulders as they walk, or knock knees in the tight spaces in the Impala, brush knuckles as they rifle through the trunk together. But this is changing, they said. It’s not set in stone yet, their future selves are proof of that, and if things aren’t changing with their memories, maybe it’s changing something else. Future-Sam has a scar, maybe they have some stupid kind of muscle memory, and that’s what’s changing.

He breathes out a sigh. “Okay, let’s focus. The point here is the shade, right? We kill the bitch, you go back to 2015, we get on with our lives.”

“That’s the idea,” future-Sam replies.

“And hope we haven’t fucked things up too much,” future-Dean mutters.

***

They wait until the sun starts to sink into the trees, and then they move out. Sam can’t manage to stay on his feet for more than a few minutes at a time without turning gray and sweaty, so Dean sets him up with a cold beer and the remote to the shitty little TV and tells him to sleep the whole thing off.

The Sam and Dean of the future team up with Dean, ride out with him in the Impala, Future-Dean in the front, future-Sam in the back. They don’t talk, don’t make conversation of any kind, just sit quietly all the way back to the cemetery. When Dean gets out, moves back to the trunk to get out his supplies, future-Sam presses in close against him and whispers in his ear, “Don’t trust Ruby,” before reaching for Sam’s sickle knife and darting away.

Dean blinks after him, wary. He’s not sure what to make of it, what to think, whether this is future-Sam trying to correct some mistake that he thinks he’s made in the past, or if he’s actively trying to direct the future in a specific direction. No matter which of the two choices it is, it’s obvious that future-Sam doesn’t want his Dean to know that he said anything.

Dean’s double comes up behind him only a moment later, stares into the trunk like it holds all of the mysteries of the universe or some shit, and then reaches in and plucks out his machete. But he stands there and stares at Dean with some kind of fascination that borders on creepy. Dean feels his hackles rising, like this damnable vision from the future can go fuck himself and all of the fucking mistakes he’s obviously made.

“Trust Sam,” future-Dean says, and his voice sounds so raw and torn.

Dean slams the trunk shut, grips the hilt of his machete, and moves off towards the cemetery and pretends that it’s just a normal hunt on a normal day and that nothing deep or heavy or painful is happening.

“Let’s gank the old bitch,” he growls.

She comes out when the sun dips below the horizon, the sky still lit up with dying golden light. She drifts in like a fog, her shadow reaching out to touch everything around her. She looks human, just to glance at her, but the shadow pulses and twitches and reaches out inky tendrils in all directions. For a moment, Dean thinks about the future, thinks about him and Sam going up against this thing when it’s more powerful, thinks about that creepy shadow reaching out and covering the entire town.

“Sam,” future-Dean says, and nods.

In a flash, future-Sam bolts out over the distance, jumping tombstones and dodging the black tendrils. He drops suddenly, rolls, and Dean can hear the grunt of pain from their hiding place. Dean’s on his feet in an instant, his double doing the exact same thing. This might be a weird future version of his Sam, but the sound of pain is the same. The instinct to protect is the same.

“Sammy!”

The old librarian drops behind a line of headstones, and Dean can’t tell if that’s a good thing or not. He doesn’t care; he’s bolting forward, machete out and ready to slice and dice. The inky tendrils reach out and tangle around his feet, but his future self is right behind, cutting away. Dean can hear a wet sound, his blade against flesh, and then the ground is clear enough for him to close the distance between him and Sam.

Future-Sam’s laid out on the ground, bleeding from a cut somewhere in his ridiculous shaggy hair. He stares up at Dean, eyes wide, brow wrinkled, like he’s confused.

“You came for me,” he says.

“Of course I did,” Dean replies. “You’re my brother.”

Sam flashes a smile so brilliant that Dean’s surprised by it, thinks that maybe it’s been too long since he saw his Sammy looking happy.

“Not the time,” future-Dean grunts, his machete flashing in the dim light. “We gotta take her out _now_.”

Dean helps future-Sam to his feet, takes stock of their situation and scowls. The old librarian is too far away, her shadow reaching out towards them like a living thing. Her attention doesn’t even seem to be on them at all; instead she just drifts back and forth between a few headstones, like she’s debating which one she really wants to eat, completely unconcerned.

Future-Sam lunges forward across her creepy shadow, sickle knife in his hand. Dean and his double flank out to the sides behind him, cutting away the crawling shadowy tendrils that reach up to catch them. She’s stronger than she was that morning, or maybe she’s stronger at dusk in general, but by the time Sam has made it within ten feet of her, Dean has sweat rolling down into his eyes.

Sam dives for the ground close to her, sickle knife flashing, and he buries the tip of it into the frosty ground.

She screeches, high and sharp, and drops to the ground like she did that morning, and her shadow snaps back into that hooked shape it was in the morning light, tendrils curled up and coiled and tight. It roils around where the knife has pinned it in place, but Sam is firm on the ground, not letting up.

Dean moves in close to the old librarian’s faded body, slashes it once across the throat. Black slime spills out onto the grass, and the shadow fades away.

When Dean straightens up, he’s alone in the cemetery.

 

Dean fell in love with Sam for the first time the day Mom brought him home from the hospital. He reached out and stroked a finger down the side of Sam’s fat red cheek, watched Sam’s eyes open up to stare at him. Mom told him that of course Sam liked him, Dean was his big brother, but Dean felt like it went deeper than that.

He fell in love with Sam again after Stanford. He loved the force behind Sam’s anger, the raw edges that only Dean could soothe, the way he grit his teeth and fought like there was only a single purpose for him on the Earth.

And after the deal, after Sam was back from the dead and driven in a completely different way, with Sam’s anger directed at him and the crossroads demon and the world?

Yeah, Dean loved him then, too.

 

Dean cleans up and heads back, body aching, just wondering. Is the future like in _Back to the Future_? Did Future Sam and Dean just vanish because they don’t exist anymore? Or are they gone because the only reason to come back was to kill the shade?

His head hurting, Dean makes it back to the motel room, finds Sam sitting up against the headboard, eyes half-mast and drowsy. He thinks about the Sam of the future, the surprise he had when Dean came after him, and something dark and tight in his chest loosens its hold. He climbs onto the bed with Sam, who starts at him but goes slack when Dean cradles the side of his face in his hand and kisses him.

They don’t do it like this, they don’t make it soft and tender, but Dean thinks that maybe that’s a load of bullshit that they should change. Soft and tender is fucking awesome, feeling Sam open up under him like it’s a relief to have him there. There’s a lot Dean wants to do to Sam, sounds he thinks he could pull out of his brother, warm looks and sighs and happy things, but Sam’s hurt, and it will have to wait until later.

“Dean?” Sam asks.

Dean breathes out, thinking of the worn-down looks on their future selves’ faces, of the proof that come Hell or high water, Dean makes it through alive. Thinks of his double pressing in close and telling him to _trust Sam_.

“Your research,” he says finally. Sam goes still under his hands, mouth drawn tight. Dean leans in to kiss him again. “Did you find anything out?”

“You want to talk about it?” Sam asks, disbelieving.

Dean shakes his head. “No,” he says, finally. “I want to help.”


End file.
